Palmetto Bay wants to build a park next door. Homeowners: Please don’t.

Palmetto Bay wants to build a small park behind the property that Kassandra Rodriguez calls her dream home, but she sees the village’s recreational plan as a nightmare.

“We know that because we are on such a main street, it’s going to attract a lot of unwanted people,” Rodriguez, a pension administrator in Miami, said of the grassy county-owned parcel by Southwest 77th Avenue. “I don’t want people parking in my front yard. I don’t want people walking around and peering into my backyard.”

Friction over the 2-acre parcel next to Southwest 140th Street has spread to the Miami-Dade County Commission, where a divided board recently blocked an effort to sell the L-shaped property to Rodriguez for $14,000 after Palmetto Bay, where the plot is located, expressed interest in buying the land for a public park.

The spat over the small parcel in Miami-Dade’s real estate portfolio touches on the sensitive topic of how changes to public space sometimes impose on private property owners, and what right residents have to complain about a recreational use next door. While neighbors in the area say that turning the lot into a public park would hurt their quality of life, government administrators at the county level and with Palmetto Bay believe the public land should be used for a public good.

“It’s currently public land, and I think it should remain that,” Village Manager Nick Marano said in a recent interview.

The most charged moment in the debate so far came hours after last week’s County Commission meeting, when the commissioner representing the area, Danielle Cohen Higgins, filmed a video highlighting a few agenda items. One was her proposed sale of the 2-acre property to Rodriguez, which Cohen Higgins’ colleagues on the commission had blocked over friction between the neighbors and the village. Cohen Higgins held up a letter from a Palmetto Bay lawyer asking for a county investigation of her proposal to sell the land to Rodriguez, which the village claims would violate state law governing public real estate.

“Unfortunately, this is what I feel about the letter and the allegations contained within,” Cohen Higgins, a lawyer, said as she tore the letter in half. “The residents will always come first for me. It’s people, not politicians.”

Tensions eased Tuesday morning when a commission committee agreed to delay voting on the Cohen Higgins item to give time for Palmetto Bay and the property owners to negotiate divvying up the property between a park and extended private backyards. Palmetto Bay agreed to modify its park plan to cede some of the parcel to the owners for private buffers between their houses and the public land.

“I think this will be a good compromise for everyone,” Rodriguez said after the meeting of the commission’s Infrastructure, Operations and Innovations committee. Karyn Cunningham, Palmetto Bay’s mayor, said she welcomed the chance to have talks with the owners. “There wasn’t an open dialogue before,” she said shortly after a private conversation with Rodriguez that ended in a hug.

The compromise came at the end of a second committee hearing on the sale on Tuesday morning, a rare move to have a county committee give a deal a second look. The legislation was kicked back into the committee pipeline after some commissioners objected to letting homeowners block a neighborhood park.

“Any time people say, ‘I don’t want a park in my neighborhood,’ it always rubs me the wrong way,” County Commissioner Keon Hardemeon, who represents parts of Miami, said at the April 2 meeting before the full commission. “Something about ‘I don’t want a park’ means ‘I don’t want visitors’ means ‘I don’t want basketball hoops.’”

Rodriguez and her husband rent out the house they own by the county lot. She said they plan to move in after a year and need the tenant revenue to pay off renovations to the house. “That’s my forever home,” she said. “That’s my baby.”

The county land behind it has been an ongoing nuisance, she said, home to teen gatherings at night, illegal trash dumping and the occasional boat on a trailer up for sale. County rules require a single purchaser for surplus land, and Rodriguez and other neighbors whose properties abut the parcel said they have a deal to divide up the real estate after the sale.

Paul Wieser, an owner who is part of the group hoping to purchase the county lot, said he’s concerned about Palmetto Bay increasing public use of land that’s already a nighttime gathering spot.

“It’s not so much people walking through in the day,” said Wieser, a longtime teacher, as his poodle, Darby, barked at a visitor on the other side of his backyard fence. “It’s the parties on the weekends. There’s a lot of noise and people pulling up in their cars close to our fence.”

Palmetto Bay’s plan for the county lot doesn’t involve playground equipment or sports, just landscaping, benches and a pedestrian path, said Marano, the village manager. The village has a plan to make the lot part of a larger project called the Tanglewood Linear Park, which would require purchasing three other narrow lots to the south that Palmetto Bay says it has also requested to buy from Miami-Dade.

“We’re just asking for a fair hearing,” Marano said.

In the middle of the fight sits the county department that oversees real estate, Internal Services. When Rodriguez asked the department for permission to purchase the lot in July 2022, agency administrators began the process of seeing if other county departments had use for the real estate. That December, Internal Services sent a letter asking Palmetto Bay if it wanted the parcel.

The village wrote back saying it was interested.

Rodriguez said she and her fellow owners were stunned to hear Miami-Dade was in talks with Palmetto Bay for the land deal because nobody from Internal Services notified them. Instead, Rodriguez said she was so frustrated by the lack of updates or information from Internal Services that she asked Cohen Higgins’ office to intervene. The commissioner’s office agreed, submitting legislation to sell the land to Rodriguez. That agenda stalled before the full commission on April 2.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Alex Muñoz, the director of Internal Services, said his staff reached out to Palmetto Bay as part of an effort to determine what made the most sense for the public land. “Both applications were considered by the real estate section,” he said. “The decision was it would be better served as a park.”

The dueling bids for 2 acres of Miami-Dade land led to escalating tensions and allegations.

In an interview last week, Rodriguez said that Cunningham, the mayor, told her she wanted the land to become a park in part because it’s close to Cunningham’s home, which sits about a half-mile away. “Mayor Cunningham wants this land,” Rodriguez said. “She told me over the phone this is the largest piece of vacant land closest to her personal home. And she wants it as her legacy park.”

Cunningham denies saying that to Rodriguez and said the proximity of the land to where she lives isn’t what’s motivating the effort to create what would be the seventh park for the suburban village of 24,000 people. “There are plenty of people who would love to see a linear park there,” she said. “A large number of folks want to see more green space in the village.”

The letter that Cohen Higgins ripped up on social media came from John Dellagloria, the village attorney.

In it, Dellagloria requested that the county’s Inspector General’s Office launch an investigation of the proposed sale outlined in the Cohen Higgins legislation, which cites a state law allowing private purchases of small government parcels if the land would only be of use to adjoining property owners.

“It is exceedingly disingenuous for the sponsor of the Resolution to suggest that only the adjacent property owner can use the property,” Dellagloria wrote in the April 1 letter.

Miami-Dade closed a similar deal in 2018, when Levine Cava was representing the area in the commission seat now occupied by Cohen Higgins. Commissioners then approved a $37,000 sale to a neighbor for the 2-acre parcel on the other side of Southwest 77th Avenue from the one Rodriguez and neighbors want. Palmetto Bay did not intervene for that sale.

Last week, Cohen Higgins questioned why Internal Services wanted to sell the parcel to Palmetto Bay after residents followed the rules to purchase the land themselves.

“Fair is fair,” she said. “They were first in line.”

While Miami-Dade can sell the land next to Rodriguez’s property, it would come with restrictions. Florida Power and Light has a perpetual right to use the land, known as an easement, and power-line towers dot the property. Property owners point to those structures as a reason the land shouldn’t be considered for a park. Palmetto Bay says it can easily work around the utility poles and easement restrictions.

Cunningham stood before the towers Friday to film a video promoting the proposed park and defending Palmetto Bay’s attempt to block neighbors from purchasing the county real estate.

“These are tough decisions,” she said. “Ultimately, though, we must choose actions that benefit the quality of life for the greatest number of residents.”